To truly understand how species’ distributions vary through space and time, biogeographers often have to make use of analytical techniques from a wide array of disciplines. As such, these papers cover advances in fields such as evolutionary analysis, biodiversity definitions, species distribution modelling, remote sensing and more. They also reflect the growing understanding that biogeography can include experiments and highlight the increasing number of software packages focused towards biogeography.

This Virtual Issue was compiled by Methods in Ecology and Evolution Associate Editors Pedro Peres-Neto and Will Pearse (both of whom are involved in the conference). All of the articles in this Virtual Issue are free for a limited time and we have a little bit more information about each of the papers included here:

Software Packages

Our Biogeography Virtual issue includes two Applications articles. These are always freely available and – like all of our Applications articles – can be accessed and downloaded without a subscription. The first of these articles comes from Bocedi et al. They introduce RangeShifter – a novel modelling platform which integrates complex population dynamics and dispersal behaviour, includes plastic and evolutionary processes and simulates scenarios on spatially explicit landscapes. Rominger and Merow present the R package meteR in their article ‘meteR: an r package for testing the maximum entropy theory of ecology‘. This package directly calculates all of the maximum entropy theory of ecology’s predictions from a variety of data formats; automatically handles approximations and other technical details; and provides plotting and model comparison functions to explore and interrogate models.